Harmony Of Struggle here with their second album Brutal Aesthetics (ZOHAR 310-2), following on from their 2022 horror Tearing Your Mind To Pieces. I confess I am still finding absolutely nothing to enjoy or recommend in Neithan’s brand of noisy power electronics, nor in the visceral cover art and confrontational track titles, with multiple references to suicide, despair, pain, and futility. If Sect7 is flirting with dark themes, as least she exhibits a modicum of empathy for the human race; Harmony Of Struggle would rather annihilate all of us, I suspect. The label take a different view, persuaded that HOS’s music has “gained a lot in sound…thanks to the new production” since 2022; further, that he’s engaged in some sort of sociological survey by examining the “techniques of manipulation” that result in these mass suicides and acts of cruelty, some of them given legitimacy by societal laws. Hmm! That’s as maybe, but it’s hard to make out the underlying message when our professor is shouting brutal obscenities at us through a megaphone, in a sea of distorted noise. It’s degrading to the audience; I’m making a mental note to not review any further records from this Neithan. (13/12/2023)

Amazingly, Clay Ruby has been blasting the material world as Burial Hex for nearly 20 years – and to mark the occasion, it’s been agreed (among the Dark Elders in charge of World Doom) that he should compile all his compilation tracks that were sent to small labels over the years. Although Burial Hex music is a supernatural and occult curse against the world, Clay Ruby himself is an affable fellow who can never refuse when asked to contribute a track to one of the many international agencies that dabble in this sort of thing, such as Brave Mysteries, Aurora Borealis, Small Doses – that’s just some of the obscure net-labels and vinyl-only merchants named here. Normally at this point I say that buying a CD like In Hiding (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR328CD) obviates the need for hard-core collectors to scour auction sites and flea-markets of the underworld, but not quite; it seems Ruby has remixed every single one of these nine blinders, so it’s not precisely the same, and if you want to hear the original mix of ‘From Heel To Throat’ you may have to shell out £14 to get an original double-cassette of Life Ist Krieg on the UK label Clan Destine. Ruby’s intention in doing th’ refashioning (using tongs and staplers) was to make In Hiding a more coherent listen so it could be mistaken for a sequenced album; but don’t all remixers say that? As to me calling them “blinders”, well, there are a few moments here where you risk having your eyes burned out by red-hot pokers, but overall it’s a surprisingly subdued set of semi-melodious darkeries, in spite of strong imagery (assorted grotesques and mutant faces) on the digipak panels provided by Nat Ritter. Didn’t Burial Hex used to be noisier, blacker, doomier, and more ritualistic than this?

Far more horrifying is The Woods (CSR322CD) by Satøri, who I now learn is a 1980s die-hard from Margate active since 1984. Actually it’s just Dave Kirby now, but this used to be a band / collaborative thing, involving the talents of Robert Maycock, Justin Mitchell, and Neil Chaney at various times, plus they had releases on that nastiest of pathological UK noise labels, Broken Flag. On today’s CD, Kirby (working solo) offers nine cuts that he made in his Somerset lair during 2020-2023, all tagged with grim titles alluding to oppression, blood lust, satanic rites, and all-round unpleasantness. “Pure noise, harsh synths and brutal percussion”, say the label, to which list I would add a tremendous amount of reverb, or possibly some other studio technique that creates the effect of running into a solid brick wall and having all the air sucked out of your defenceless lungs. Many such audio “slams” to be heard on this CD, which don’t simply describe oppression – they force you to experience it. There’s also some occasional shouty vocals performed with all the self-importance, bombast, and drama-queen pomp I’ve come to expect from this kind of retro power-electronics nonsense. All I can say in favour of The Woods is to enthuse mildly about the clever open-ended structure of each horrible tune, which allows our man Kirby to execute some unexpected dynamic twists. Witchcrafty-style moody cover artworks by Helasdottir.

Well, so much for the “evil” face of this sociopathic record label. We turn lastly to Continuous Hole (CSR325CD), which is credited to Drew Daniel and John Wiese. 100% American noise nurtured and grown in the hellpits of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and, erm, Baltimore (that last locale is very far from being the 21st-century Gomorrah we’d expect). The CD rescues a 2018 LP that surfaced for five minutes on the Gilgongo label in America. No idea how they made it, but it might have something to do with cut-ups; we’re not told what source material was used, but the artistic coup has been to equip most tracks with a sort of pumping, hump-like fucking rhythm that’s about as precise as your old Dr Rhythm beatbox, yet they did it all manually – no MIDI or sampling guaranteed! Approvingly, the press notes speak of a “labour-intensive” process as Wiese and Daniel shared the mutual pleasures of “frenzied cutting”. Having used the “noise” word, I might want to reconsider that in the light of the strange and alienating tones that emanate from this rum beast. Certainly Wiese has been “harsher” in his prolific career behind the wheel of HMS Noiseblast, but I haven’t heard much new from him for many a year now. Drew Daniel comes to us from Matmos and also The Soft Pink Project, and though no stranger to rubbing shoulders with prominent noise idols, also seems to be something of a commentator and analyst, what with his booklet on Throbbing Gristle and his assorted liner notes for Coil and People Like Us. Continuous Hole is a jolly enough ride, I suppose, though I’m not feeling the truly visceral, dangerous and ferocious elements which other listeners have perceived; it appears more like a mechanistic game or toy, trying to prove some obscure point about physics or philosophy, using a rotating wind-up model. Even the cover photo casts a cerebral air, hinting at a modern alchemist or necromancer at work in their study. The six panel digipak artwork prints and repeats a black hole in the centre, as if the designer were aiming at an avant-garde version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

All three from 21 September 2023.

From Poland, we have Parabola who also calls themselves Elektronik and used to be a member of Yutani, a duo who played bass guitar, electronics and drums on Not Much of a Talker in 2022. Parabola has evidently decided they can make their point without any help, thank you, on Pure Holistic Evil (ZOHARUM ZOHAR 294-2), a collection of eight nasty all-electronic punch-fests with titles that hint at unpleasant themes of darkness, murder, destitution, and oppression. As power-electronics goes, Parabola’s take on the genre is surprisingly approachable – melodies, regular beats, and not too much excess from the distortion department. But the ideas are thin, and each cut runs out of steam in less than two minutes. Despite his avowed iron-fist themes, the music lacks real clout; rather than being beaten up by masked thugs, it’s more like witnessing a mild attack of harmless pests in the home. (11/07/2023)

I’ve written all I can about Tunnels of Ah and their brand of suffocating infernal racket, but I will mention that The Smeared Cloth (ZOHARUM ZOHAR 297-2) is available for completists who want to hoover up these unpublished tracks from 2012-2018. Apparently they’re taken from the early pre-Lost Corridors era and from the Thus Avici sessions, thus pre-dating this fellow’s debut on Cold Spring, while the second disc concentrates on the brief time-window between Surgical Fires and Charnel Transmission. About two hours of charred, blackened noise, sufficient to smother your hopes and dreams. (11/07/2023)

Low-key tones from Indalaska on their Musique Des Sables (ZOHAR 272-2) album. The French brothers Olivier and Frédéric Charlot evidently enjoy finding expression in many different band projects, even when it’s the same duo – previous manifestations were Maninkari (classical-ish played on obscure instruments) and Sphyxion (heavy on the synths). I quite liked Sphyxion, but this new incarnation doesn’t manage to engrave any new lines on my tusks; it’s (roughly) their take on cold and minimal wave ambient-drone, and the label tells us it can be enjoyed as frames from a slow-motion film of some sort, unfolding at a very relaxed pace. This “sandy” material feels thin and under-nourished to me; not enough concrete events, or a sense of moment, going down onto the tapes. The promised visit to “unknown endless spaces” never really materialises from these spidery notes, lacking depth and perspective.

Mektoub: 1001 Nocy Paula Bowlesa (NO NUMBER) by Rafał Kołacki is, of all things, a radio play. It uses droney music and field recordings with readings from the work of Paul Bowles. On it, Kołacki aims to express the charismatic nature of this writer and say something about his epic journey to Tangier. We’ve got sounds captured from streets and markets, and (inevitably) the muezzins calling the faithful to prayer, a sound which seems to have appeared on every record made by a European or American in this part of the world, from Muslimgauze to Justin Bennett. One would perhaps hope that Tangier itself is teeming with vitality, or that the story of this unusual beat writer who decided to emigrate there would inspire a bit more interest; instead, Kołacki fails to spark a single moment of excitement across 45 minutes of listless aural tedium.

The three persons behind Deep Fields (ZOHAR 285-2) have spent a lot of time in 2021 and 2022 researching cosmological things, and giving lectures in scientific institutions about outer space, more specifically promulgating information to do with magnetic and acoustic wave phenomena. Calling themselves Voices Of The Cosmos, they’ve now decided to pool their efforts on these nine tracks of sounds, in celebration of the great Copernicus – it’s related to his 550th anniversary. Rafal Iwanski, Wotjek Zieba and Sebastian Soberski appear on the inside panel artwork all wearing identical black shirts with their logo, which may resemble an Egyptian eye of Horus and possibly represent another link to Sun Ra (Copernicus appeared on the cover of The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra Volume 2). No quasi-scientific lectures appear on the record, but there are plenty of radio telescope sounds hopefully captured in their private observatory, spliced with synths, tone generators, drum machines and effects – producing the sort of identikit electronic drone that this label loves so much. Kinda process-heavy material, but compelling in a low-key way; it may not convey any truths about such things as white dwarfs, electrons, pulsars and sounds of the sun, but I suppose what we’re really hearing is simply cosmic energy transformed into radio. Voices Of The Cosmos might have added more depth and illumination when they delivered their lectures, but they don’t do so here. Sun Ra himself would be asleep by this point; at least he tried to actively engage with his chosen subject matter, effectively making his own mind and body into a radio telescope, and when seized with inspiration from the galaxies, his synths would breathe fire like a supernova. This CD simply emits a faintly warming glow.

I’m feeling more agitated by the music on Learn The Hard Way (ZOHAR 283-2) by Exit Electronics, but I’m not at all proud of that feeling. Justin K Broadrick of Godflesh fame has recently embarked on this solo project and emerged with a souped-up form of power electronics set to punishing beats; apparently he’s trying to distance himself from the “industrial techno” tag associated with his earlier work, unless I’m misunderstanding the finer nuances of the press note. What’s clear is the sheer aggression of the music, where every note, every layer, is beefed up to maximise distortion to create a concrete wodge of industrial blackness – an unbelievably closed-in sensation for the listener. The aggression is further amplified by the horrible track titles – all of them pretty much telling you that you’re completely wrong, your life is hopeless, and you’re going to get beaten up (either by life, or by an abusive partner); all nasty sentiments which are underscored by the use of shouty full capitals…still, full marks to Exit Electronics for coming up with the innovative term “filthstep” to describe this deeply unpleasant assault from his two fists. This record may be a reissue with two extra tracks of something that came out digitally in 2022. If our Polish friends don’t offer him another deal after this knockout punch, I for one might well expect to see him surface next on Cold Spring Records. The usual “strong meat” warning applies; listen with caution.

Heavy political history lesson from Brandkommando on his 1989 (ZOHARUM ZOHAR 281-2) album…the cover art may help to clue you in, but if not the press notes helpfully explain that it’s about the Christmas Revolution that took place in late 1989 in Romania, of which one outcome was the deposition of Nicolae Ceaușescu. As serious scholars (unlike me) of history know, this was part of a wider pattern of civil unrest involving other countries in Eastern Europe, leading eventually to the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Brandkommando, Karol Wachowski has been making socio-political records since 2005, with titles like Pax Vobiscum and Time Of Violence, some of them using highly objectionable imagery for cover art. We have to give him the benefit of the doubt when he claims to be “attacking ideologies stemming from propaganda in authoritarian systems”, but it’s awful to see musicians are still using death camp photographs on their records. Brandkommando may represent a diehard school of power-electronics maniacs in Poland, but 1989 isn’t an overpowering wall of feedback and shriek, often achieving its unsettling effects by very simple (albeit very insistent) means. That said, most of you may tune in and hear nothing but a guy shouting slogans and harsh rants over a degraded, abrasive blanket of noise. (27/02/2023)

Kollaps does produce songs of a sort, albeit they’re more like chants and declamations delivered in a shouty manner through a distorted microphone with plenty of studio echo, and the lyrical themes are far from pleasant or uplifting, as Black seems intent on purging his inner soul and exorcising many demons that beset his internal core. Alongside the vocals we have a remorseless barrage of very “metal” sounds, distortion, feedback, and factory-styled blows from the mallet of despair. We’re informed in some detail about the choice of non-musical objects in the Kollaps arsenal, including metal grates, cylinders, and a hoist (all rusted up of course – his aesthetic seems to require frequent raids on junkyards and disused industrial sites), plus there’s a self-built metal coil, an apparatus by now quite “notorious” with the fans when he takes it on tour and assaults the stages of the Antipodes and certain parts of Europe.

By this point I expect listeners will have little trouble positioning Kollaps alongside well-known metal-hammering types of the 1980s, such as Neubaten and Test Dept, but it’s fair to say that Kollaps is taking the ideas in his own personal direction, the better to express his own dark themes; it might be suitable to think of him as a tortured romantic poet along the lines of Mallarme or Baudelaire, except he is far more pessimistic and goes a lot further into the hidden reaches of the human heart. As with many artists who adopt a depressive mantle, they can’t help believing the rest of the world is as depraved or debauched as they, and many of the songs here make plain Wade Black’s contempt for the human race, assuming that everyone is equally motivated by base self-interest. For evidence, I direct you to such tunes as ‘I Believe in the Closed Fist’ or ‘Hate is Forever’. The ‘Closed Fist’ one appears to be his own litany of violence, a personal creed which he recites in hateful tones, including an inversion or parody of Catholic liturgy – a trope which might seem a bit well-worn now after decades of blasphemous Black Metal albums, but there it is. Meanwhile ‘Hate is Forever’ is a pretty effective sonic portrait of an oppressive Hell, filled with pain and negativity, the vocalist’s snarl buried under a ton of metallic clank and groanage. I shan’t say every track is propelled by the same overpowering and bloodthirsty noise, as there are quieter moments such as the synth drones on ‘Closed Fist’, although even these manage to emanate menace like clouds of poison gas, and the acoustic guitar on the title track, a self-pitying dirge that is firmly in the Nick Cave mode and set in a grisly minor key.

My other reservation concerns the way all of these questionable ideas are turned into rather noble-sounding abstractions, labelled using terms such as “condemnation, redemption, romanticism, atonement, passion, compulsion, determination”. Admittedly these words come from the press release and reviewers, not from Wade Black himself, but this type of verbiage does lend a veneer of respectability to the enterprise that might not have been completely earned. Thomas Ekelund did the cover artworks. We heard Kollaps previously on their Mechanical Christ record from 2019, when they were still a trio. From 25th July 2022.

Düsseldorf running Amok on their CD (ZOHAR 269-2) of same name…despite their German name this duo are all-Polish, but they do pay homage to a strain of Berlin electronic music with their sound, which is admittedly somewhat “cleaner” than many of the murkoid specimens which inhabit this label. Apparently the experts classify this as “EBM”, i.e. electronic body music, a sub-genre which splices together elements of industrial noise with synth-punk of the late 1970s and modern dance music. Amok ends up pretty percussion heavy, and when the drummer is let loose he can’t seem to stop filling up the cracks between the brickwork with his patented brand of aural cement. The multiple synth lines and macabre melodies are also working like steam engines, and the cumulative effect is quite melodramatic. All played by Tom Axer (synths, voices) and Jacek Sokołowski (drums), although Adam Radecki seems to be the original mastermind behind this project, active since 1989 on a sporadic series of cassettes for Odd Records.

Yutani are the somewhat mysterious trio from Warsaw with nine tunes on Not Much Of A Talker (ZOHAR 257-2). I like the title here, reminding me of when I once stormed out from a party of colleagues in a bar without saying goodnight, and later one of them told me there was no need to apologise for making a “Polish Exit”. Since then I’ve assumed that a sullen, uncommunicative mode might be a character trait of this noble race. Yutani don’t exactly manifest it here though, and this combination of bass guitar, electronics and drums is clearly the product of a threesome who have quite a lot to tell us, even if it might project a vaguely aggressive and dissatisfied air. Yutani seem keen to tick a lot of genre boxes (electronic, dark, psychedelic, chillout, industrial), unless that’s just the press department working itself into a tizzy. Some nice moments here, and full marks for telling us that the bass and drum parts were “recorded in dirty basement rooms of a building that no longer exists”, and having a drummer named Inutile Carcasse, but the musicians could benefit from developing a lighter touch.

Popsysze are another combo departing from the usual Zoharum aesthetic, and on their Emisja (ZOHAR 258-2) album deliver seven tracks of very competent and crisp gtr-bass-drums trio music, occasionally adding lyrics. If you’ve ever craved an Eastern Europe rethink of Firehose or Meat Puppets, this would be a good place to start. Apparently the producer Michal Mielnik and mixing by Michal Kupicz accounts for the “light touch” in the sound, since it seems on their previous Kopalino album the trio couldn’t help inclining towards their dark masters, such as the cocoa bean. The lyrics are sung in Polish natch, but they allude to imminent environmental disasters threatening the globe, not that you’d know given the equivocal and even-tempered timbre of the vocalists Jarosław Marciszewski and Jakub Świątek, who might as well be singing about an unsuccessful trip to the laundrette for all the emotional passion they muster. Still, I suppose that cover graphic could be read as an indicator of the growing global warming problem…

Back to more grisly territory now with Tearing Your Mind To Pieces (ZOHAR 267-2), a remorseless power electronics album from Harmony Of Struggle. It’s certainly very “retro”, what with the digipak covered with unpleasant photos of wartime atrocities and injured men, harking back to Throbbing Gristle and other shocking nasties from the industrial past, although the front image (no less unpleasant) has a combination of sexual and violent imagery which could be mistaken for a more extreme take on Surrealism. HOS have the hubris to name themselves after a release by Clandestine Blaze, the Finnish Black Metal solo act whose espousal of National Socialist Black Metal themes in their oeuvre have resulted in several sales being blocked and banned by the Discogs site. Plus you’ve got track titles here like ‘Shock Tactics’ and ‘In Control’, in a tracklist which reads like the Heinrich Himmler instruction manual. So far, so horrible. HOS is Neithan who might be Michal Kielbasa, also behind such projects as Whalesong, Lifeless Gaze, Grave Of Love and Nothing Has Changed – with this smorgasbord of depressing acts, he covers Black Metal, Doom, and Industrial genres. Plenty of horrifying themes on this release, and even the sound itself is deliberately made into something extremely ugly by excessive layering, distortion, and sound manipulation, with results accurately described as “deformed”. Jointly released by the hateful Polish underground label, Old Temple. Strong meat warning – approach this record at your own risk.

Reformed Faction comprises three ex-members of famed minimal droners Zoviet France, i.e. Andy Eardley, Mark Spybey, and Robin Storey, who in a moment of rapprochement joined forces again in 2005 and released Vota (ZOHAR 262-2) followed by a string of records for several years thereafter. I think Eardley may have walked away from the group at some point, but I haven’t looked into the tale too closely. The Zoharum label evidently revere Zoviet France, given their comprehensive reissue programme of Storey and his Rapoon albums, so one can see why they’d be keen to put this one out, although Klanggalerie already did a very good job of it in 2006. Even so, today’s version has been remastered, and the cover design has been slightly tweaked, with no expense spared on the spot-varnish on the digipak panels. I’ll admit I’m not the world’s foremost collector of Zoviet France, but this Vota album is winning me over with its subtleties. I like the understated, suggested melodies and moods, indicative of larger forms lurking below the surface of a misted-over pool. If it’s done through live group performances, as I assume a lot of it is, it’s all the more impressive for this mastery of many diverse elements – instruments, tapes, loops, and electronic effects blended like ingredients in the world’s largest and sweetest layer cake.

Lastly we have Groth (ZOHAR 268-2) by Groth, which is about one of the worst records we’ve heard this year. Utterly undistinguished and obnoxious metal music from this Polish foursome, of which the most nauseating aspect is the histrionic vocalist who seems to have affected an American accent and throws in plenty of outdated rockist cliches, perhaps in some misguided bid by the band to gain wider commercial acceptance. When the singer finally manages to shut his yap, you can hear how truly mediocre are the gtr-bass-drums trio manufacturing this clumsy, misbegotten mess. Still, the label seem to think they’re onto something, praising the “lurking ambient-psychedelic connectors” in between the sickening riffage and poundage. Yuck.

The one by Autopsia is In Vivo (KPD988), a reissue of an earlier tape from 1988, now remastered and with bonus tracks. We have heard from this mysterious project around 2008-2009 when we received some odd records such as The Berlin Requiem and Radical Machines Night Landscapes, but today’s offering is rather different to these, and is situated more in the unpleasant zones of grim industrial blastery and power electronics, making much use of repetition, tape loops, found sounds, and treated voices making endless chants. The track titles aren’t exactly full of sweetness and light either, and the whole release is split under two headings proposing to deal with “God” and “Satan”. I suspect the creators don’t have a subtle theological debate on their agenda, and instead the plan is to confront the listener with extremes. Thankfully, the “Satan” side doesn’t appear to be an endorsement of all aspects of ritual magick, although the reference to the 11th Enochian Key does give pause.

The cover art, continuing to use the red and black colour scheme which was in use 14 years ago, is an update on the original cover which, on the Sound Of Pig cassette version from America, just stopped short of the kind of imagery that Mussolini would have recognised, that of a Teutonic knight or crusader making a power salute in front of a warhorse. I’m far from my usual comfort zone with all of these elements, and while some of this strange and remorseless audio krankery can be endured, I’m sensing a whiff of sulphur in the nostrils which is unwelcome. As to the creators behind Autopsia, nobody really knows for sure; they’ve gone out of their way to present an anonymous front, and intimate that the actual personnel involved may change at any time depending on the project.

Katacombe Vol. 3 (KPD3) is another reissue, this time from 1984, and it rescues a cassette tape jointly released at that time by Korm Plastics and the German label Schrei Records. The original item seems to have become quite collectible among the cognoscenti, and was even reissued as a CDR in the 1990s. Matter of fact, this is the fourth edition.

Once again we’re in the area of industrial and extreme experimental music, and all the Dutch groups here were active in the Netherlands – Het Zweet, Throw Me Your Finger, MTVS, Arthur Berkhoff, Zombies Under Stress, Disturbed Life, Friends in Low Places, Y Create, and two names I’ve actually heard of – Kapotte Muziek and De Fabriek. Frans de Waard, famed prolific creator of the low countries and now curator of the Vital Weekly review site, curated the tape and described it originally as “hard electronic and mutant muziek”; interestingly, none of the tracks had titles in the original incarnation, although they’ve been added since, and the photocopy insert came with a bunch of mailing addresses in Rotterdam, Eindhoven, Amsterdam and such locations for the mutoid weirdsters who made the music, reminding us of how experimental music once throve in the 1980s using the international postal system.

Like the Autopsia item above, plenty of tape loops and merciless electronic howling to be found here in the oxide, but somehow I’m finding it a lot more approachable, happy to accept its generally gloomy and angry caste as an indicator of a deeply-felt critique of society or a sign of personal depression. There’s also something endearingly odd about the sounds, as if many of the creators here were not interested in producing a polished, finished effect, and rather felt their passions so urgently that they had to blast out their emotional laundry using the most obnoxious and distorted settings they could find, along with clunky sounding echo and primitive beatboxes. All of this is welcome to a listener like myself who often finds themselves wearying of the smooth, inoffensive and bloodless concoctions that pass for “ambient” music these days, but this may also reflect a yearning for an imagined golden age of tape music in the mid-1980s. The variety on offer on this tape indicates that might not have been a complete fantasy; there’s a genuine sense here of rules being broken, of a very pro-active search for artistic freedom and self-expression regardless of how abrasive or obnoxious the results may be. 100 copies were made.

Both the above from 7th March 2022.

Heavy depressing synth noise from the team-up of Mulo Muto with Black / Lava, on their tape Worlds Corroding Under Xenomorphs’ Ejaculations (URBSOUNDS COLLECTIVE URB058). As you may tell from the title and the seven “chapters” of the work, the team are telling us a dystopian science-fiction story about the gradual invasion of a world by hostile aliens, who eventually dissolve all humanity with their baleful powers. No use in me explaining the tale, as it’s printed for all to read on their Bandcamp page. What matters more is the groaning atmospheric racket on the grooves, where the musicians use everything from ugly distorted synths to pounding industrial drumbeats to bring home the plot-points of their twisted narrative. They also use that much-maligned technique, that of the spoken-word voiceover, delivered in suitably menacing tones, sometimes giving this release the air of a broadcast radio play. I think we’re supposed to interpret this voice as that of the alien forces; it certainly sounds angry enough, dripping pure contempt for puny humans as surely as Morbo in Futurama. Much sonic information is layered into these over-crowded dense audio nightmares, including field recordings, samples, tape loops, voices, guitars, and what they term “heavily used synths”, which I would take to mean instruments that are antiquated and in need of repair, delivering wheezy scrawls and bellows. Mulo Muto are Swiss, Black/Lava are Italian, and this item has been jointly released with the Marbre Negre (MN151) and Italian Extreme Underground (I.E.U. 020) labels. Plus there’s the cover art with the gigantic cosmic eye which aspires towards the art of Virgil Finlay, or may even be sampled from the great pulp illustrator’s work. I like this one well enough, and it certainly makes me feel nauseous and unsettled, but the foursome take too long setting the scene and don’t work hard enough to advance the story; it’s like an amateur horror video, with only one camera angle, stuck on a single cheap home-made set.

Anything with a skeleton on the cover is welcome in my abode, and a black skeleton even more so. This one is a split (URBSOUNDS COLLECTIVE URB057) between Catafalque and Coalminer. On the A side, UK team Catafalque regale us with ‘A New Torquemada’ and ‘Charred Remains’ for about 15-16 mins, patiently building a very dense drone out of brick rubble, twisted metal, and the dreams and hopes of yesteryear. With their near-brutal minimalistic and concentrated approach on the first cut, they suggest an alien combine harvester mowing down all of humanity as it slowly advances towards us. On their second foray, the relentless abstract scream of feedback and despair is propelled by terrifying drumming; it’s possible to mistake these monsters for a form of extreme metal, I guess, but there’s something semi-artistic at play in these particular shrieksters. The three charmers responsible are Thomas Ozers from The Dead Yesterdays, with Dan Dolby and Mike Shepherd of Mastiff. Though not reviewed in these pages, I can recommend the 2019 Catafalque release, a deeply unpleasant assault of grim noise with hellish beats.

Power electronics from Manila in the Philippines is what we get with Coalminer, the duo of Chester Masangya from White Widow and Robert Glen Dilanco from Lush Death. The squall of ugly feedback is tempered by a melancholic sighing tone on ‘He Never evolved To Be Human’, lending a slightly poignant air to the sonic violence. It’s as if the cruel pounding of Merzbow were crossed with a more humanistic music, such as a distorted form of electro-acoustic music made with reverbed springs (and monks chanting in the chamber next door to the studio). ‘Abscess Of Purity’ betrays the same problem this duo have in shaping their work; they can’t really manage starts or endings, and just present a solid wodge of express-train roarage as if they were cutting yard goods off a roll of cheap fabric. Even so, some fascinating detail can be combed out of the morass of conflicting signals and overloaded magnets, pulling at the iron filings of your brain. I see these fun-loving types recently made a split with Government Alpha, which is a bit like finding Sean McNabb starring alongside Lawrence Tierney.

We’ve been hearing the powerful and pessimistic music of Urbanfailure since 2004 at least, and Michal Lichy rarely fails to layer on the cement with a trowel as he hammers in the rivets and lays down 20-ton foundation blocks…as you can see, only the most fanciful “building” metaphors will suffice to express the solidity and weight of his work. His Recurring Errors (EXILES NO NUMBER) tape has cover art by Vladimira Pcolova which continues the theme of the previous record Radical Rest, depicting an impossible building in a state of decay, with vents and utility pipes hanging out like intestines, the grey concrete, girders and prison bars all standing in for various forms of state-authorised control. The music was all recorded in Lichy’s living room during 2021, but I often imagine him walking around the oppressive cityscapes of Eastern Europe to gather notes, and transforming his moods of despair into the cathartic music we hear on the tape. This particular item isn’t quite as ferocious or angry as Radical Rest, and indeed its spare rhythms and restrained blasts might even amount to music which verges on the “approachable”, but the tone is still informed by an underpinning mood of hatred and anxiety. I think his anger this time is turned against a state which continues to make bad decisions and judgements – the “recurring errors” of the title – at just about every turn, whether it be in town planning, economics, or public transport. Ignoring the consequences, these bad politicians just heap more wrong moves on top of their previous wrong moves, until eventually everything fails; it’s up to the rest of us to suffer the consequences of these systematic failures. We’re now in a world predicted with typical accuracy by Mark E. Smith in 1982, where everything is made “with the highest British attention to the wrong detail, become obsolete units surrounded by hail”.

All the above from 28 February 2022.

We have interpreted previous She Spread Sorrow records as some sort of inverted Catholic confessional rite (no doubt taking cues from the press release) with their whispered vocals and steady meditational dark drones lulling us into an unwelcome state of mind as we confront hidden terrors. Today’s item isn’t far apart from that mode, but it also elects to tell a story (the huntress has a psychotic relationship with Blue, the very prey she’s trying to track down) and it’s based on nightmares, always a popular trope with this listener who laps up any record which purports to be inspired by dreams or sleepless nights. Kundalini’s personal dreams and night sweats have fed directly into this release, and as an earnest of how seriously she takes her work, there was apparently a three-year creation period involved in the realisation of this obsessive vision, which may or may not contain hints of forbidden love and transgression. Cover artworks on the six-panel digipak show our heroine immersed in a cross-shaped pool which might even be the baptismal font inside a modern church, but the walls of the pool are painted a deep red, the colour of blood, an image which runs deeply throughout the intoned verses of Huntress.

Listen to the end to discover the outcome of this fevered story, one which could be read as a pessimistic, ambiguous update on ‘the hunter gets captured by the game’ theme. (01/11/2021)